Simon Averill: 'Splitter' & Mark Jenkin: 'An Air That Kills', At Millennium, St Ives

Royal Cinema, St Ives, Cornwall, February 2014

Whenever I’m in West Cornwall, I normally spend a few hours in St Ives, and this time was no different.  I have slightly ambiguous feelings about the place if I’m honest, as it seems to epitomise slightly too much of what is hackneyed about the whole Cornish Art/Tourism interface, with a big element of the surfing and sailing lifestyle industries thrown in too.  Sometimes, I feel that if I see one more Cerulean sky, abstracted generic boat or ceramic VW camper, I’m going to kill.  Also, it always seems to pour with rain when I go, - just as it did this time.

Porthmeor Beach With Tate, St Ives, Cornwall, (Photographer Unknown)

However, despite it’s current incarnation as a tourist honeypot, St Ives does retain vestiges of its identity as a formerly prosperous fishing port.  It’s difficult to ignore the appeal of the town’s labyrinthine back streets and, despite its popularity, Porthmeor beach is an enjoyable expanse of pale sand, limpid light and broad, rolling waves.  I also like way the buildings facing directly onto that strand, mostly display a combination of faded Modernism or workaday utilitarianism.  Even the Newlyn/St Ives Schools’ current HQ at the Tate occupies a retro-futuristic former gas works.  In fact, the element of occasional Modernism in St Ives’ architectural identity echoes the fact that its art scene was, briefly, a genuine outpost of the international Avant-garde, however much it repackages that tradition for commercial consumption.

Artists' Studios, Porthmeor Beach, Cornwall, February 2014

Central amongst the buildings at Porthmeor are the famous artists’ studios, once occupied by Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron, amongst others, and now hosting a couple of the more interesting of the current generation of artists in Sax Impey and Richard Nott.  Both are represented by the town’s commercial Millennium Gallery, along with several other favourites, including Mark Surridge, Andrew Hardwick, Trevor Bell, Gareth Edwards and Simon Averill.  It was the latter’s work on display this time, under the title ‘Splitter’, and it maintained the high standards of most shows I’ve seen at Millennium in recent years.


Simon Averill, 'Splitter':

Simon Averill, 'Splitter', Millenium, St Ives, Cornwall, February 2014

Simon Averill, 'Splitter', Acrylic On Panel, Date Unknown

Simon Averill In His Studio, (Photographer Unknown).

Averill’s current paintings adopt a form of all-over pattern making that reminded me slightly of Pollock.  Although more obviously derived from sensations of light on complex, glistening surfaces or filtered through bands of foliage, there is a similar willingness to allow the paintings resolve themselves through the chance effects of fluid media and a guided randomness across the entire plane.  In fact, the tension between control and accident in Averill’s work is really impressive and I spent a while with my nose (nearly) pressed to them puzzling over the technicalities of their production.  I was also intrigued by the perceptual anomaly of paintings that are so visually convoluted actually having surprisingly smooth, subtly nuanced and carefully varnished surfaces.

Simon Averill, 'The Small Stuff', Acrylic On Panel, Date Unknown

I like this tendency, on the part of many of the current generation of environmentally orientated Cornish painters to feed from the powerful sensations around them without becoming straightforwardly enslaved to landscape or maritime depiction.  It’s possible to see impressions of light, water and botany in Averill’s work, but also to sense a deeper meditation on unity versus complexity, or even the operations of particle physics.  There is something vaguely Japanese, even Zen, in his use of a largely monochrome palette, often accented with reds, and those almost ceramic-like surfaces seem more than mere affectation.

Simon Averill, 'Long Division', Acrylic On Panel, Date Unknown

Averill himself highlights that ‘Splitter’ is a reference to the conditions in which photons are unpredictably transmitted or reflected by transparent materials, like glass or water.  It’s impossible to escape the effects of light as the Penwith peninsula tapers into the Atlantic.  With the sea on both sides and a constant procession of changing weather conditions, it acquires an almost palpable quality, - something that Averill has remarked upon, and an obvious reason for the appeal of Cornwall to painters down the years.  The allying of visual sensation with a consciousness of Physics seems to take things an interesting step further.

Simon Averill, 'Reactor', Acrylic On Panel, Date Unknown

Simon Averill, 'Refractor', Acrylic On Panel, Date Unknown

That sense of scattering is key to Averill’s organisation of marks, but so too is a tendency toward clustering, often of small loops and dots that suggest something at work on a microscopic level as much as they do barnacles, bladders or bubbles.  I’m also reminded that Sax Impey, whilst currently occupied in a detailed study of the effects of reflected light on ocean surfaces, once produced paintings mapping the arabesque dances of sub-atomic particles.

Sax Impey, 'Event 9', Mixed Media On Wood, 2005

Mark Jenkin, 'An Air That Kills':

The top floor of Millennium is currently given over to work by Newlyn-based filmmaker Mark Jenkin, in particular, his three-chapter piece, ‘An Air That Kills’.  This resolutely analogue film utilises the randomisation of both imagery and textual narrative to evoke a sense of biographical nostalgia, loss, and the changes within an environment and an individual life, over time.  The three sections focus on separate passages of Jenkin’s life, including a Cornish childhood, a period of rail travel way from this milieu, and reflections on the more recent transformations (and prevailing constants), wrought on the Mounts Bay area.

Mark Jenkin

There’s nothing especially original in this concept, but I found the melancholy tone, overt subjectivity and willfully degraded visual texture of the film, engaging enough.  In particular, I like the filtering of an environment, so often associated with recreation and the idealised leisure experience, through the more jaded, multi-dimensional filter of a biography unfolding within it.

Mark Jenkin, Stiils From 'An Air That Kills', Artist's Film, 2014

The sense of a search for emotional/psychological meaning, or even just a stable existence within a physically or economically precarious environment is something I’ve thought about a lot on various trips to Cornwall.  It can be difficult to resist the customary visual clichés of the place, many of which retain an immediate appeal, but I do also find myself seeking photographic motifs that might evoke the sometimes mundane and sometimes precarious realities of life there.  I was delighted by the film’s inclusion, (in the third chapter, - ‘This Our Shit Hole’), of the Sainsbury’s supermarket where I’d stopped for petrol just an hour earlier.

Mark Jenkin, Stills From:  'An Air That Kills', Artist's Film, 2014

In my view, anyone interested in the contemporary art scene in West Cornwall would do well to visit Millennium.  For me, it forms a quartet of such must-visit venues along with Newlyn Art Gallery, The Exchange at Penzance and, of course Tate, St Ives.  Their exhibitions consistently prove that, down at the very end of things, it’s still possible to produce and present work informed by a familiar environment without resorting to triteness or stale predictability.  I should also point out that Millennium’s expanding roster also includes figurative painters as well as sculptors and multi-media practitioners.

Andrew Hardwick, 'Brown Sea And Sky Exmoor', Oil, Acrylic, Varnish & Collage On Panel, 2012

Trevor Bell, 'Heel', Mixed Media On Canvas, 2010

I suppose the atmospheric minimalism and painterly ambience to which some of the painters tend, could eventually become as comfortable as the abstract formalism of an earlier generation, but I still find much of it very seductive.  I also detect various attempts on the part of various individual artists to prevent their work slipping into a mere generic style.  In addition to the extra dimensions of meaning already discussed in relation to Averill and Jenkin, this would include Impey’s highly specific rendering of waves and direct experiences as a sailor; Nott’s alchemical focus on process and materiality; Edwards’ occasional and poetic textual elements or references to film stock; or the collaging of Scalextric track and toy vehicles into Hardwick’s landscapes.

Richard Nott, 'Script', Mixed Media On Paper, Date Unknown

Gareth Edwards, 'Emotional Weather', Oil On Canvas, 2011

In addition to still images and artist profiles, the well-sorted Millennium website features numerous video interviews and exhibition tours, and I’m impressed to see these now being included on disc in their well-produced catalogues.

Mark Surridge, 'Storm Glow', Oil & Carborundum, Date Unknown

Simon Averill’s ‘Splitter’ and Mark Jenkin’s ‘The Air That Kills’, both continue until 11 March 2014 at:  Millennium, Street-An-Pol, St Ives, Cornwall TR26 2DS.